Tucked away down a village street in Long Wittenham, Pendon Museum is much more than either a fascinating collection of beautiful miniature buildings - though it is that - or a series of enormous 00-scale model railway layouts, though it is that as well.

The museum was the inspiration of an Australian, Roye England. Its largest exhibition portrays, in astoundingly accurate detail, the countryside of the 1920s and 30s, and suggests, through visual clues presented with a mischievous sense of humour, the stories of its inhabitants' lives.

"Roye came to Britain in 1925, partly to patent a system for controlling model railways," said the museum's development co-ordinator, Malcolm Smith.

"He stayed with a cousin who was vicar at Warborough, and he fell in love with the Vale of White Horse and the Great Western Railway running through it. One day he saw a cottage, previously a pub, with the thatch being stripped off and replaced with pink asbestos tiles - he thought this was so terrible he decided to make a model of it as it had been."

This was the beginning of the village of Pendon Parva, which is fictitious in name and exact topography but consists of buildings (made essentially from card and watercolour paint) identical to real ones somewhere in the Vale at that period.

"Because he could see the landscape he loved was changing, he went round recording it through photos and sketches. He appears with his notebook in Pendon Parva, modelled by a lady who sent him to us from California.

"We have an archive of his material - some of the photographs are in our then and now' display. It can be helpful to people outside the museum - recently an architect who was restoring a particular barn came to look at our model and the stuff we had on it.

"The interiors are historically correct too - the school, for instance, has its tall desk for the teacher, benches for the pupils, even a map on the wall showing a lot of pink for the British Empire - but the public never sees this because the school was not lit at night."

Peering through open doors on some of the other buildings, you can see bicycles, cats, even cobwebs (19 of them, according to Malcolm).

The owner of one of the cottages on which a model was based saw it in the museum, the kitchen illuminated by an oil lamp in night time' mode. She told Roye she remembered his visit and he'd got the detail right, down to her husband's socks hanging up to dry.

He replied that he'd also included the loose knob on their chest of drawers and the spike with the bills on. Ah' she said proudly "that's wrong! They were receipts!'"

Such telling examples of a way of life which has largely disappeared are repeated throughout. Houses have their vegetable patches - one of which features the smallest model in the museum, a pinhead-sized cabbage white butterfly - their cottage flowers, and their privy.

A quirky display features a number of these made by would-be volunteer modellers as test pieces. Malcolm's is disturbingly realistic, with a nasty green mould on the brickwork - you almost shiver at the thought of a visit to it on a rainy winter's day. Several of the in-situ privies have been used to tell a story - in one is a gentleman who is clearly somewhat the worse for drink, and coming out of another, belonging to Bridgecombe Farm, is a little girl in wellingtons.

"She is a great friend to the museum, Marcella Seymour, who still runs the farm at the age of 81 - it looks very different now. The reason for the wellies is that the privy had been modernised but the new concrete floor had a hollow in it where water used to collect."

Pendon has, of course, a railway station and a GWR line running through it. A half-sunken narrowboat by the brickworks (currently under construction) on the Wilts and Berks Canal poignantly represents the decline of cargo-carrying on the waterways at this time, as rail transport took over.

Much other local, social and personal history can be gleaned, with the help of the guides, from cameos like these - all extraordinarily lifelike, and created with enormous patience, skill and ingenuity.

The stems of hollyhocks, for example, are made from a single bristle, or, in Roye's case, a cat's whisker. "The model-maker's motto is I'm bound to find a use for it, so I'll keep it' " said Malcolm.

Apart from Pendon itself, the museum has a Dartmoor scene featuring a model of Brunel's long wooden viaduct - a structure so well engineered, Railtrack might be interested to note, that worn timbers could be removed and new ones substituted without disrupting the train schedule.

It was made and donated by the co-founder of the museum, Guy Williams, who was moving house and could no longer accommodate it.

Some other famous examples of the modellers' art - John Ahern's pioneering Madder Valley Railway of the 1930s (complete with incline leading up the Madderhorn'), and the street and church models of John Warner and Gerry Hall - have also found a permanent home at the museum, as have a number of actual locomotive plates and a signal box interior. Visitors can see the Madder Valley Railway in operation on June 15 and November 15.

Malcolm has just put together an exhibition, Building in the Vernacular, linking models with information about materials used in the original buildings.

"These were varied because of the varied geology of the Vale - they are local, so the buildings look as though they belong in the landscape. They have a common style - they were built by builders rather than architects, and each built like their father and grandfather, with perhaps a new idea pinched from someone in the next village or something they'd seen on a visit to town."

"This museum is unique in terms of conservation because it portrays a complete rural scene as it was in the 1920s and 30s, even to the extent of getting the height of the crops right; showing how everything - housing, transport and land - fitted together."

Pendon Museum, Long Wittenham, Abingdon OX14 4QD. Open Saturday and Sunday 2-5.30pm, and some school holiday Wednesdays - call 01865 407365 . Adults £5, child 7-16 £3. Concessions for 60+, families, and groups